Some Finishes

Nearly everything came to a halt at the beginning of May as my work for quilt show ramped up. At the end of the month, it became important to my mental health to get into the sewing room; so I took a couple of days to quilt and bind my little Christmas Cards mini, which finished to about 16" x 18". I do like this little quilt a lot. 

After finishing up most of my work for the month of June, I dedicated myself to finishing Granddaughter's birthday quilt. Unicorn Abstraction was a kit from VioletCraft, and it has all the elements my DGD loves--a unicorn, rainbow colors, stars, and metallic fabrics. And she loved it when she got it for her birthday. 

The quilt finishes at 60" x 60", and the entire quilt is paper pieced. The pattern was well done, and I had no trouble assembling the pattern. 

One really good tip the designer had was to use those little plastic binding clips to align the pieces when sewing the large sections together. I was surprised how well they worked. 

Another really good tip was to use glue to hold the fabric pieces down at the edges of the sections. Except for the head and tail, most of the pattern pieces were really big, and they flopped around at the edges. I have never been a big fan of using glue in any of my sewing; but in this case it was nearly a necessity to keep everything flat and aligned. 

I used the Sewline glue pen on the regular fabrics, but that didn't hold the metallics down well at all. So I resorted to Roxanne's Glue Baste It, which worked a little too well. I found it a bit difficult to remove the paper in those spots, but I'm sure it all washed out in the end. 

Loved the detail in the head and the tail.

I quilted it with a stars and loops design from Sue Schmeiden. Before I washed it, it looked like the horse had curly hair, lol; but after laundering it became soft and crinkly, and the quilting was less clear. 

This afternoon I finished binding the Bon Bon quilt, which was the first quilt made from Barbara's Scrap Bag. See the post here describing my Scrap Bag Challenge.

My quilt chapter found a new organization to donate to this year, called C.R.O.W.N.S. They are an organization local to Maine that provides assistance for women and girls who are being trafficked in the state. I found it shocking to discover that this goes on in Maine. C.R.O.W.N.S. was asking for quilts about 50" x 60", and that is just about the size of this one, so it will go to them. 

The original quilt pattern called for more blocks to make a square quilt, and the blocks were to be set in a Trip Around the World pattern. I wanted a smaller rectangular quilt, so I settled on this zig zag sort of design. I like it just fine. 

I quilted it with the Popcorn pantograph by Jodi Beamish. 

With the exception of the solid whites that went into the Bon Bon quilt, this is the entire stack of fabric from Barbara's Scrap Bag, which is taller than my big embroidery machine. I started cutting up some of the low volume neutrals for Bonnie Hunter's Cherry Crunch quilt, and didn't even put a dent in them. There's a LOT of fabric in this stack. 

I have a couple different quilts I'm going to cut for as I go along, but the next one I intend to work on in earnest is Carolina Chain, from Bonnie's book 'Addicted to Scraps'. That should use a bunch.

Bon Bon

First, thank you to Grace, Judy, and Julie for your lovely comments on my pineapple quilt. I've had trouble getting Blogger to forward comments to my regular email. After I complained about it one day on the blog, Wanda from Exuberant Color said that Blogger doesn't seem to forward her comments if they source from aol or yahoo. 

Yesterday, I discovered that Blogger actually did forward all the comments from the Pineapple quilt post. One of them landed in my mailbox. The other 4 went right into the Spam mailbox, which never gets anything, so I rarely check it. There they all were. It's always something with Blogger.

Back to Barbara's scrap bag, one of the piles I sorted was neutrals. I further sorted those into tans, creams, white tone on tones, low volume prints, and solids. I had just barely started the Bon Bon quilt when Barbara gave me her scrap bag, and I was using a solid white background so I could use that fabric up. All of the white solids from the scrap bag promptly went into the quilt and have already been used up.

Bon Bon is a free pattern from Fat Quarter Shop. It is a very simple, very quick quilt to make; and it uses a precut called a Jolly Bar, which is exclusive to them. A jolly bar is a stack of rectangles cut 5 x 10"; so depending on the pattern, you could substitute two charm packs or part of a layer cake. I happened to have on hand 4 identical charm packs I found at a good sale at Marden's, so I'm using them in the Bon Bon quilt. 

I had the block components assembled for 16 blocks for a 30-block quilt, and I put the 16 blocks together today. The other 14 block components are cut, and I just have to sit down and sew them. The quilt used most of two charm packs, so I'll have enough to make another quilt to use up the rest. The first quilt is meant to be a charitable donation, the second will go to a girl in the family.
 

Barbara's Scrap Bag

My good friend Barbara has been a quilter for many years. Actually she considers herself more of a crafter than a quilter, and she loves to make purses and bags, outfits for her grandkids, things like that. 

Like any good quilter, Barbara dutifully saved all her scraps for years, thinking that one day she might make a scrap quilt like so many of us do. Even though scrappy quilts have never really been her thing, she finally did try some different projects but was unhappy with her efforts. 

Recently, with destashing in mind, she finally decided to throw in the towel on scraps, and I became the very happy recipient of a kitchen-sized bag of her scraps. Lovely scraps, larger pieces, newer lines, not calicos and such. Her taste in fabrics is not as eclectic as mine, but there is still plenty of variety and appeal. 

I sorted her bag into color groupings as I considered what I might do with them. I finally decided to take a recent note from Bonnie Hunter's blog; and rather than cut them up into squares, rectangles and strips for the scrap bins, I decided to challenge myself to actually use them up in a series of quilts. 

My only rule for the challenge is to make as few quilts as possible out of the scraps. That might be a 3 or 4, or it might be 20, if that's what it takes. I have no timeline in mind, and I may work on them here and there in between other projects, or I may sit down and plug away at one in particular. I'm also allowing myself the latitude of adding my own scraps to the mix to make a quilt the size I want, but I plan to use up Barbara's first if possible. No rules, save the one.

There is a tab at the top of my blog now to list the quilts I'm working on, have finished, or thinking about.The first one is already in the works.